How much data should publishers collect?

As academic publishers continue to consolidate power through diverse mergers and acquisitions, librarians need to be better informed about our role in facilitating “academic freedom”.

 

How are Scopus, ScienceDirect, LexisNexis, Mendeley, SciVal, SSRN, Pure, and Elsevier related?

They’re a few of the vast holdings of RELX, a multi-national conglomerate with £3 billion in profit in 2023 (RELX 2023 Results).

Why does this matter?

In a recent article titled “Elsevier’s Stranglehold on Academia: How Publishers Get Rich Off Our Data”, Christien Boomsma starts by taking us through a day in the life of an academic, listing some of the touchpoints where they and their work interact with RELX products. Boomsma is a journalist and librarian at the University of Groningen, so while “UG” in the article refers to “University of Groningen”, staff and students at the University of Galway are in the same position.

Whenever we find an article through Scopus, add references to Mendeley, deposit an article in SSRN, or access the Reaxys database, Elsevier is not just making money from our subscription fees, but they are also gaining access to our personal data. Selling this data is now one of the main sources of income for massive publishers such as Elsevier.

As library users, we cannot opt out of being tracked by subscription databases, and we have no control over how our data is used. For example, when legal professionals and their clients access the LexisNexis databases, their search histories are tracked by via LexisNexis Risk Solutions and sold directly to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As Sarah Lamdan, Deputy Director of the American Library Association, states, “Beyond owning legal research products, they’re selling the surveillance products that help law enforcement track, detain, and charge people with crimes” (2019). To be clear, the libraries themselves do not have access to this level of data–it is gathered by the publishers on their own systems.

At the University of Galway, the Library’s contribution to the ScienceDirect consortial contract is in the multiple hundreds of thousands of euros per annum (the exact figure can’t be disclosed), which provides reading access to the “Freedom Collection” and a portion of the 1,170 article processing charge (APC) credits distributed nationally. Our annual allocation of APCs for 2024 was 133 articles, which was exhausted in early October this year; consequently, authors whose articles were accepted after that date have been left between a rock and hard place if they are publishing in a gold open access title but don’t have recourse to their own grant funding. In addition, approximately €30,000 per year has been paid to Elsevier by individual authors at University of Galway for an average of 10-15 APCs outside the national allocation.

What can we do about it?

Libraries have a role to play in ensuring that our members understand the price of “academic freedom”. Dr. Lai Ma, Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies at UCD, explores this question in her article, “The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and how to Fight It”, which unpacks some of these insidious trends and proposes ways in which they can be resisted.

Ma sets out four key actions we can take to fight the platformisation of scholarly information:

1. Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs
2. Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing
3. Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform
4. Advocate for research assessment reforms

We look forward to hearing more from Dr. Ma as the keynote speaker at our next Open Research Forum on 12 Dec. She will be discussing “Sustainable Open Research Infrastructure”. In addition to Dr. Ma, the other two speakers at the Forum will be Prof. Dónal Leech, Dean of Graduate Studies; and Dr. Cillian Joy, Head of Open and Digital Research.

If you’re in Galway, please register to join our in-person event (for catering purposes).

Written by Dr. Jen Smith, Open Research Librarian

References 

Boomsma, Christien. “Elsevier’s Stranglehold on Academia: How Publishers Get Rich Off Our Data.” UKrant.Nl, 6 Nov. 2024, https://ukrant.nl/magazine/elseviers-stranglehold-on-academia-how-publishers-get-rich-from-our-data/?lang=en.  

Lamdan, Sarah. “Librarianship at the Crossroads of ICE Surveillance.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 13 Nov. 2019, www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/ice-surveillance/.  

Ma, Lai. “The platformisation of scholarly information and how to fight it.” LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, vol. 33, no. 1, 7 June 2023, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13561.  

“RELX 2023 Results.” RELX, 15 Feb. 2024, www.relx.com/media/press-releases/year-2024/relx-2023-results.